A Romanian couple who exploited their seven children as beggars and thieves in and around London have been jailed at Reading crown court for two and a half years for child cruelty.

Speranta Mihai, a Roma who lived in Slough and took her children, now aged between two and 16, begging and stealing across south-east England in a systematic operation, was sentenced by Mr Recorder Whittaker alongside her husband, Gheorghe Mihai, who pleaded guilty to child cruelty, benefit and tax fraud and money laundering.

The Mihais were arrested in a dawn raid by officers from Operation Golf, the Metropolitan police's investigation into what it believes is Europe's largest human trafficking ring. It is centering on the small Romanian town of Tandarei from which as many as 1,000 children have been trafficked across Europe for the purposes of benefit fraud, begging and theft.

In the year preceding his arrest, Gheorghe Mihai, 36, passed £47,000 through his bank accounts, including £35,000 in tax credits, housing and child benefit that he defrauded from the state.

When the police arrived, most of the children were found sleeping on the floor of the sparsely furnished house in the Berkshire town with little food.

Four required dental treatment and three suffered from infestations of headlice. One of the youngest children was later found to have scarring consistent with cigarette burns and another with a lesion. The injuries happened while the children were in their parents' care, the court was told.

The prosecution said the evidence added up to a general pattern of "neglect and cruelty" and that – despite defence denials that the children were trafficked from Romania for exploitation – the children had been brought to the UK expressly for that purpose.

Speranta Mihai, thought to be aged around 33, would take her children begging in Luton, Wembley, Southall, Soho, Hyde Park, Edgware Road and Oxford Street, as part of what the court heard was the Mihai "family business".

"It is an act of cruelty to bring children up in a life of crime," said Gareth Branston for the prosecution. "The Mihai family business is begging or stealing and that is the education they gave their children."

None of the children were in school and the couple were both convicted of child cruelty for failing to educate them. Speranta Mihai was convicted on a second count of child cruelty for "causing her children to be engaged in begging".

She was warned repeatedly by the authorities not to beg, but that turned out to be pointless, the prosecution said.

One day she was stopped by police at Edgware Road and placed on a train at Paddington back to Slough. Three hours later she was found begging with her children outside Bayswater underground station in London.

It was part of "a relentless pattern of movement to exploit their children as tools for begging and stealing", the prosecution said.

Members of the Mihai family were stopped by law enforcement agencies for begging and theft 99 times, following their arrival in the UK in 2007.

Their behaviour was consistent with "complex grooming and behaviour patterns that keep children locked in a cycle of exploitation", according to a statement read out in court from child trafficking expert, Christine Beddoe, the chief executive of ECPAT UK, the anti-trafficking charity.

The children are now in local authority care.

Officers from Operation Golf said the traffickers' own estimates suggest each child can earn as much as £100,000 a year in the UK. In recent years, as many as 100 lavish new homes have sprung up alongside the shacks and mud tracks of the Roma enclave in Tandarei, eastern Romania, thought to have been built with the proceeds of child exploitation.

In April, officers from Operation Golf made 18 arrests in Tandarei during dawn raids with Romanian police and senior members of a gang suspected of having trafficked 272 children, many to the UK. They found dozens of guns, including AK-47s, pump-action shotguns and rifles, travel documents, thousands of pounds in £50 denominations, and bundles of euros and local currency.